1. Technical Field of the Invention
The invention relates generally to configuring and managing available resources; and, more particularly, it relates to configuring and managing available resources within a communication device.
2. Description of Related Art
Data communication systems have been under continual development for many years. Generally speaking, within the context of communication systems that employ various types of communication devices, there is a first communication device at one end of a communication channel with encoder capability and second communication device at the other end of the communication channel with decoder capability. In many instances, one or both of these two communication devices includes encoder and decoder capability (e.g., within a bi-directional communication system). Transferring information from one location to another can be applied generally within any type of communication system, including those that employ some form of data storage (e.g., hard disk drive (HDD) applications and other memory storage devices) in which data is processed and/or encoded before writing to the storage media, and then the data is processed and/or decoded after being read/retrieved from the storage media.
Certain communication systems employ one or more of various types of coding (e.g., error correction codes (ECCs) whose decoding may be performed iteratively) to ensure that the data extracted from a signal received at one location of a communication channel is the same information that was originally transmitted from another location of the communication channel. Communications systems with iterative codes are often able to achieve lower bit error rates (BER) than alternative codes for a given signal to noise ratio (SNR).
Within recent developments within some communication systems, there is an ever increasing desire to support various types of services (e.g., voice, data, etc.) over a common communication link. The various standards that operate within such communication systems place requirements and restrictions on the various service flows that operate in accordance with the standard. For example, a physical layer (PHY) device is typically configured and set to operate in accordance with the various physical layer requirements to be compliant with a particular standard (e.g., a corresponding error rate performance (bit error rate (BER), block error rate (BLER), etc.), a corresponding data rate in bits per second, a corresponding modulation, etc.). This problem becomes exacerbated when there are multiple service types and/or service flows being supported between the first communication device and a second communication device. A typical prior art approach by which this may be effectuated is to provision an adequate of functionality (e.g., hardware, software, etc.) within a communication device to support each of these various requirements associated with each of these various types of service flows.
As may be understood, this can be not only extremely costly in terms of real estate/footprint of a device but also in terms of actual dollar cost to implement a device. There simply does not exist an adequate means in the art for supporting various service flows in an efficient and cost effective manner.